Look who’s stalking: the black leopards of Gloucestershire

By Jem Bartholomew

In autumn 2014, John Bilney was cycling to work at around 6am along a tree-shaded footpath in Dursley, Gloucestershire, when a small cat leapt into his way. “Poor moggy,” he thought, “I’ve scared it.” Then he looked up – and froze.

Up ahead, he saw two huge leopards, sleek and muscular, arcing across the path. Each looked to be at least four-foot long. They mounted a grass bank and rested just below the tree line. “What are you?” Bilney shouted at the top of his voice. The creatures didn’t flinch. Then, as if trying to shoo away a fox, he yelled, “Get out of it!” The leopards eyed him. Dread choked Bilney and he quickly cycled away.

Bilney’s work colleagues thought he was crazy. (Even today, they still mock him. Once, when he was reading a paper, someone asked, “Is that Big Cat Weekly?”) When he got home, he looked up local newspaper reports of similar sightings, which was how he found Frank Tunbridge, who lived nearby and was often quoted in the press as a “big-cat expert” (a term he hates). Tunbridge said they should immediately return to the scene of the encounter.

When they reached the spot, Tunbridge scrabbled around looking for traces of the creature: stray hairs, paw prints in the mud or scratched bark on trees. Tunbridge has a busted left knee and ankle, causing him to throw his weight rightwards when walking. He says this improves his tracking, forcing him to move slowly and observe carefully. “Frank found a lovely bit of poo, bit of scat, and he was pulling it apart in front of me with his hands,” Bilney remembered. Rabbit or deer bones would indicate that the scat came from a carnivore. “He shook my hands when he left later,” he laughed.

Tunbridge has spent 30 years searching for evidence of Britain’s big cats. Not a day goes by when they don’t prowl through his mind. He’s convinced they’re living in the countryside and his commitment to proving this has made him Britain’s go-to man for sightings of exotic predators. He records the details of each report in his notebooks, some of which feature biro sketches scratched in thick black lines. A retired carpenter and car-boot-sale organiser now in his 70s, he has wiry hair, sharp eyes and jowls weathered by long hours spent outdoors. Over the years Tunbridge has put cameras in scores of locations across the British countryside to obtain confirmatory footage. Every holiday offers the opportunity to collect more evidence from a new place. He usually has a handful of camcorders in position at any one time and spends hours sifting through video.

Thousands of people in Britain populate big-cat Facebook groups but only a few dozen are committed to tracking the beasts. “There’s an inner circle to the cat world. You sort of need to amble your way in,” one tracker put it to me. Tunbridge has strolled right to its centre.

Believers engage in acrimonious spats over the phenomenon’s origins. Most theories point to the passage of the Dangerous Wild Animals Act of 1976 as the crucial moment. According to this narrative, carnivorous beasts were a must-have accessory of the Swinging Sixties, when yuppies apparently walked savannah cats down the King’s Road in Chelsea. There’s a story that two men bought a lion cub in Harrods and raised it in their Chelsea apartment.

In 1976, the theory goes, a crop of nouveau-riche owners sought to dodge newly imposed ownership fees by liberating their status-symbol pets – cheetahs, leopards, lynx, pumas – into the wild. A handful of people have owned up to stealthy releases. In 1980 a puma, later named Felicity, was captured in the Scottish Highlands and lived out her life in a wildlife park. Natural England, the government body that oversees the English countryside, has received 94 unconfirmed reports of big-cat sightings since 2001. (Tabloid stories over the same period number in the hundreds; trackers say many people don’t report what they’ve seen, for fear of ridicule.)

During the early months of the pandemic, Tunbridge noticed an uptick in people saying they’d seen big cats in the hills of the Stroud Valleys in Gloucestershire, near his home. People claimed they’d encountered leopard-like creatures, often at twilight, the time of day when leopards are most active. Descriptions were remarkably consistent, said Tunbridge. Most talked of an animal larger than any dog with a black body, yellow eyes and a thick, kinked tail. Many report that their own dogs trembled. Some also described a sand-coloured creature. One man snapped a few blurry pictures of an animal behind a hedgerow metres away. “I wasn’t scared,” he told the Daily Mirror. “It seemed to be playful.”

Tunbridge reckons that, as people stayed indoors, the animals roamed British pastures with confidence. Sober media outlets such as the bbc and the Times treated these reports seriously. Would this be the moment, the trackers thought, when their sceptical countryfolk finally came around?

Britain’s only native large predator cat, the Eurasian lynx, died out around 600ad. Though not technically a “big cat” – the ability to roar, not purr like a lynx, is one rule of thumb for separating middling cats from large ones – the Eurasian lynx is thought to have disappeared as a result of hunting and deforestation. The extinction of the lynx was symptomatic of the taming of the British countryside. Woodland covered 75% of the country until the Bronze Age, when much of it was cut down to create farmland. The Domesday Book, compiled in 1086, records that just 15% of England was blanketed in trees. By the early 20th century, the proportion in Britain was just 5%. (Because of rewilding, woodland now covers 13% of Britain; in the European Union, some 38% of the land area is forested.)

He saw two huge leopards, sleek and muscular, arcing across the path

The first written record of a so-called “alien big cat sighting” was made in the 1820s by William Cobbett, an mp and radical pamphleteer. “Rural Rides”, his serialised account of horseback jaunts through the south of England, records a boyhood memory from the 1770s, when he saw in Surrey a “great wild grey cat” as “big as a middle-sized spaniel dog”. (Some trackers insist this must have been a lynx; evidence suggests a feral tomcat.)

Big-cat sightings became more frequent in Cobbett’s time. Folktales told of a “monster cat with eyes as big as tea-saucers” that terrified the people of Dorset up to the 1820s. These encounters coincided with the Industrial Revolution. Country folk flocked to towns as farms mechanised and required less labour.

The early reports of big cats can be seen as an expression and symbol of resistance to the great upheaval of industrial capitalism. They were proof that the country remained wild at heart. The mythical beasts of the British imagination often appear at moments of modernisation. The Girt Dog of Ennerdale, which supposedly slaughtered hundreds of sheep in the north of England, also emerged in the early 19th century. Sightings of the Loch Ness Monster, believed by some to be a Jurassic-era aquatic reptile, coincided with a major upgrade to the Highlands road network. (There have been over 1,000 reports over the past 90 years.)

An appetite for dangerous beasts was piqued by the full opening of Regent’s Park Zoo to the public in 1847, which contained many big cats shipped from Britain’s colonies. Guidebooks emphasised the ferocity of the jaguars, leopards, lions and tigers housed there. The zoo’s popularity was accompanied by a pervasive anxiety that these animals might slip their bars and ambush oblivious Londoners. In 1826, zookeepers at the Exeter ’Change Royal Menagerie had shot dead Chunee the elephant as he smashed the walls of his enclosure – it took 90 minutes and 152 bullets to bring him down.

By the early 20th century, the trope of a predator at large was well-established. In “A Tiger’s Skin”, a short story by W.W. Jacobs published in 1902, an escaped circus tiger lives in the woods, stalking nearby villagers. These fears were not just imagined. In 1903, a Canadian lynx was shot in Devon – an anatomical analysis conducted in 2013 suggested that it may have lived feral after breaking free from a menagerie.

The British big cat came into its own in the years following the second world war. No county was complete without its own fantastical feline: the Beast of Bodmin Moor, the Cougar of Cupar, the Fen Tiger, the Nottingham Lion, even the Sydenham Panther. To go by the tabloid headlines during the 1960s, you could scarcely pop out for a pint of milk without tripping over a puma. The rise of the tabloid press helped mould a front-page staple out of a traditional legend.

Most reports described an animal, larger than any dog, with a black body, yellow eyes and a thick, kinked tail

Even government ministers gave big cats serious consideration. In 1983, after a spate of sightings, the Royal Marines undertook a mission to find the Beast of Exmoor. Despite 50 men from 42 Commando, a police helicopter and the vigilant nostrils of the Torrington Foot Beagles, they found no trace. Nor did the public, even after the Daily Express offered a cash reward for a photograph. In 1994, farmers in Cornwall reported a series of eviscerated sheep, which they attributed to the Beast of Bodmin Moor. Nicholas Soames, then junior agriculture minister, commissioned a six-month inquiry to assess the risk to livestock: there was “no verifiable evidence for the presence of a ‘big cat’”, the report concluded. Many people around Bodmin accepted this. Some continued to believe. A few insisted that there had been a government cover-up.

Dozens of sightings still make local and national headlines each year. But since the 1990s a stigma has attached itself to the Big Cat Question. Tunbridge is accustomed to ridicule. “People say, ‘Oh that Frank Tunbridge, he’ll be seeing dinosaurs next’. But it’s water off my back, I get used to it all.” Tunbridge’s faith is affirmed in other ways. A press interview typically yields five new callers reporting glimpses of big cats. His talks attract dozens of curious folk. It opens people up, he says. There’s “safety in numbers”.

Tunbridge’s obsession started young. On a trip with his father to London Zoo aged four, a leopard charged towards him, snarling, spitting and rattling the bars of the cage. This “frightening encounter became etched in my memory”, he later wrote. It sparked a lifelong yearning for excitement and danger. “The worst thing in the world is boredom,” he told me.

It was a turbulent childhood. His father gambled and the family struggled to pay the rent. They moved frequently. “My father was very good and kind when he was sober, but a lot of the time he was drunk,” Tunbridge said. When he was 12 his family left London for Dorset, a county rich in big-cat mythology. As a “bit of a loner”, he “turned to animals”, staying out late looking for newts and owls. In the pastoral landscape he discovered a new world. “If you look around, if you look at the trees, the grasses, the streams – there’s life everywhere!” he told me. “Was it Theroux who said, ‘Everyone should have a piece of wilderness in their heart’?”

In his 20s Tunbridge moved back to London. He worked on building sites until he saw an intriguing job ad in the Evening Standard: “Operative wanted for job in security. Must have knowledge of the building trade.” During the interview, he realised he was being recruited as an industrial spy. “She said to me, ‘It can be quite dangerous’,” he recalled. He accepted the role eagerly. Tunbridge infiltrated sites where labourers were suspected of laundering cash or stealing timber. Every evening, he’d write down what he’d seen and heard. The job gave Tunbridge a thirst for uncovering the concealed. Soon he was using the same skills to hunt cats.

In 1964, when Tunbridge was a boy in Dorset, the Surrey Puma became a national news story, and was blamed for injuring cows and deer. It garnered over 360 sightings. The puma leapt into the headlines again in the 1980s. By then, Tunbridge was working as a carpenter. He drove from London, hoping for a glimpse, and felt invigorated by his return to nature. But it wasn’t until the early 1990s, after Tunbridge had moved to Gloucester, that he was initiated into the community of big-cat seekers.

No county was complete without its own fantastical feline: the Beast of Bodmin Moor, the Fen Tiger, the Gloucestershire Growler

An ex-soldier called Eddy – “bit of a character he was” – taught Tunbridge how to track and introduced him to the right people. In his living room, Tunbridge showed me a picture of himself from 1992, wearing camouflage and beaming in autumnal woodland, a knife strapped to his belt. From then on big-cat hunting became a “fascination”, a “quest to get to the bottom of it”. Tunbridge looks back nostalgically on the 1990s as an uncorrupted era before the keyboard sleuths arrived. “You had a more dedicated person in the big-cat fraternity,” he said, “dedicated to the subject, not to the publicity.”

A stern portrait of a wolf greeted me as I stepped into Tunbridge’s home. While Tunbridge made coffee, I studied his bookshelf, which contained old leather-bound volumes with titles such as “The Nature Lover’s Recognition Book” and “The Private Life of the Otter”. There was a resin figurine of the animal that Tunbridge believes accounts for about 90% of sightings: the black leopard.

The most credible sightings, Tunbridge says, must have multiple witnesses at close proximity with video or photographic evidence. Sue Evans, a Cotswolds local, told me about the time in 2000 when she was strolling through a field and noticed the sheep huddled strangely together in the middle. Then she saw a big black cat. “There it was, this beautiful panther,” she said. “I got this massive adrenaline rush.” She was rooted to the spot until it disappeared into the bushes. Her husband Phil thought she was pulling his leg.

Phil maintained his scepticism until, in February 2020, the couple and their daughter spotted a similar black creature from their kitchen window. In a phone video of the incident, you can see the animal on the other side of a field. It’s impossible to judge its size: it could be as large as a terrier or a Great Dane. “Oh, I’m shaking Phil!” Sue cries in the video. “These sheep haven’t got a clue.” Phil is no longer a sceptic. “Twenty years I’ve called her the Cat Woman of Woodchester,” he told me. But when he saw the animal, he almost “jumped off the chair”.

A friend of Tunbridge, a fellow tracker called Alyn English, went to the scene. English took along a life-sized stuffed leopard to re-create the video (trackers call this method of approximating the dimensions of their quarry “scaling-up”). He concluded that the animal was much larger than a domestic cat. English then examined the terrain. An oak tree in a woodland clearing had a single moss-free branch, perhaps stripped by the cat as it observed its prey. He also found bone-rich faeces and stored them in a Ziploc bag for dna analysis. (English told me that the sample was still sitting in his home freezer: “My wife is very forgiving.”) Then he set up a camera and waited. The footage threw up badgers, deer, fox cubs, pheasants and stoats – but no black leopards.

Tunbridge has a similar method to English: he works with his nose close to the ground. In June 2021 I joined him on an expedition. A woman had reported a big cat scampering across a field close to some woodlands. The sighting had occurred about a year before, in the early weeks of the pandemic, but lockdown and a flare-up in Tunbridge’s dodgy knee delayed the investigation. Our plan was to assess the best site for a camera and scour the area for prints, scat and the remains of prey.

There’s a general hunger for something that’s larger than us and our little lives

The train to Gloucester, where Tunbridge lives with his wife and dog, carves through the lush countryside of the Stroud Valleys, nicknamed Big-Cat Country by one tracker. The gently rolling hills and laid-out fields seem an unlikely habitat for an apex predator. But there are also pockets of ancient woodlands carpeted with moss and ferns. From Robin Hood and Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” to rebels during the English civil war, the forest has always served as a stronghold of resistance to traditional authority.

Tunbridge knows that he needs to investigate rigorously. “I’m the biggest sceptic,” he said. “If you’ve got no proof, you’ve got nothing.” He admits that conclusive evidence has been missing for every reported sighting so far. When you’re frozen with fear, he pleads in mitigation, it’s hard to grab your phone, unlock it and start filming. To convince the incredulous public, he would need one of the “Three Cs”: a corpse, close-up footage or a captured big cat. But Tunbridge, champion of the wilderness, would never set a trap that might harm or even catch an animal. So he resorts to old-fashioned, shoe-leather tracking.

He pulled up in his Skoda on the edge of an untamed wood. The key to tracking, he explained, is the meticulous observation of nature. A pebble out of place, shrubbery bent over, the grass pressed into the earth. “Carnivores leave little notes of their passing, but you have to be patient,” he said. “Move too fast, you miss it.”

On the path we came across some animal droppings. “I guarantee that’s dog,” Tunbridge said, stooping over. “We’ll soon find out.” He poked at them with a twig, turning them over to examine the contents. “It’s quite fresh,” he noted. Next, he skewered a nugget with the twig and, wrinkling his nose to dilate its passageways, wafted it under his nostrils, sniffing the scent in a series of short inhalations. He paused. “Now that’s a very sort of corny smell, almost a wheat smell,” he said. “There’s no bones in there. It could have been a dog fed on a very non-meat diet.”

Tunbridge and I shouldered our way through a gap in the foliage to enter the wood. It seemed untouched by man. Ivy hugged the birch. Fallen trees were rotting on the forest floor. As we went deeper, Tunbridge spotted the remains of a pigeon carcass lying in the undergrowth. Its feathers were matted, as if gently chewed. “A sparrowhawk?” Tunbridge asked himself, crouching and thumbing the feathers. “I don’t think so.” More likely a fox kill, he concluded.

The best spot to place a camera is at a junction where footpaths cross. Tunbridge believes that big cats prefer an easy route over hacking through thickets. This maximises the amount of footage, as his cameras record only when they sense movement. When we found a good place, Tunbridge strapped the camera to a tree and took out a bag of catnip, which contains the chemical nepetalactone to mimic natural feline pheromones. “They use this in zoos,” he said. “If you look on YouTube, you can see a tiger rolling in ecstasy.” Laughing, he called it the “cannabis of the cat world”.

“People say, ‘Oh that Frank Tunbridge, he’ll be seeing dinosaurs next’. But it’s water off my back, I get used to it all.”

Tunbridge sprinkled the catnip in an old sock, then opened a bottle of Lynx Seriously Sensitive shower gel and poured the musky-smelling liquid around the camera. (The logic: “It’ll stop to sniff it.”) Cameras are left for weeks until the batteries run down. If they haven’t been stolen, a common impediment for cat hunters, Tunbridge will analyse the findings.

Before covid, Tunbridge could be found in town halls and village churches up and down the country giving talks alongside Rick Minter, another big-cat tracker. They made a compelling double act. Tunbridge would spin yarns of sightings and imitate growls; Minter discussed practical steps the government could take. “I’m the boring policy analyst and Frank is the feet-on-the-ground, practical guy,” Minter told me.

Minter, a parish councillor, is more cautious in his claims than Tunbridge. A former policy officer at organisations that later merged into Natural England, he caught the bug after a sighting over a decade ago and now hosts a podcast, “Big Cat Conversations”. “We have some fierce rows,” Minter said, about evidence, inferences and theories.

Tunbridge believes a small number of leopards or pumas were released by their owners and bred with large domestic cats, perhaps Maine Coons, creating a self-sustaining hybrid he terms the “British Big Cat”. Rachael Bodenham, the big-cat keeper at Chester Zoo, told me that though big cats can interbreed, any offspring would probably be sickly and infertile. She thinks that the sightings are more likely to be black Labradors or feral cats, which can grow large in the wild (there are around 250,000 strays in Britain’s towns and cities alone). Still, Tunbridge is convinced of his hybrid theory. He cites Canada’s pizzly bear, a grizzly-polar bear hybrid discovered in 2006, and the coywolf, the product of interbreeding between coyotes and wolves. Both are fertile. “After a while”, Tunbridge said with a tone of reverence, “nature finds a way, you see.”

Minter takes a different tack from Tunbridge. He suspects that there are around 500 black leopards or pumas roaming the English countryside, which come together to breed. But he says he’s willing to have his hypothesis disproved. “It’s like a family row, you still love that person,” he said. (Minter admits that his passion has taken a toll on his own family, who sometimes get “really pissed off” by the amount of time it eats up.)

Disputes over communications strategy often provoke tension. Tunbridge is keener to discuss state cover-ups or leopard corpses in government freezers than Minter. Over the decades he’s provided hundreds of quotes to newspapers and connected witnesses to journalists. These days he speaks mainly to the local press: tabloids spread the word but he worries that they sensationalise sightings. Tunbridge reckons the cats are more afraid of us than we are of them. They’ve been here long enough without attacking humans. Yet photo editors invariably choose an image of a snarling leopard to illustrate a news story.

Trackers deny that they’re obsessive: they’ve seen their efforts excite the public, which is increasingly urban and increasingly online, about the wonder of the natural world. “The thrill of watching a wild animal or bird at close quarters is unforgettable,” Tunbridge has written.

But he also suffers from growing disillusionment. In 2009, he wrote a poem in the Gloucester Citizen, “Oh! For England”, lamenting the disappearance of a country, “Where garden birds sing./Where service and fair play,/Not money was King”. He has watched the landscape of his childhood vanish. “This is England now, with supermarkets, housing estates, building sites, too many people, too much traffic,” he told me. The existence of big cats would prove the survival of an ineradicable strain of wildness in the face of developers and industrial farmers.

The gently rolling hills and laid-out fields of the Stroud Valleys seem an unlikely habitat for an apex predator.

The view that Britain ought to be wilder has adherents beyond the brotherhood of big-cat hunters. Ecologists promote rewilding to stem the decline of native animal populations and habitats. The State of Nature report, published in 2019 by conservation organisations, calculated that since 1970 around a fifth of species have suffered a strong decline in numbers (defined as halving in population every 25 years). Around 15% of species are now vulnerable to extinction, including the hedgehog and the skylark. A group of environmentalists has developed proposals to reintroduce the lynx to the Scottish Borders, where deer devour fruit, grass and tree shoots so voraciously that the Muntjac deer has been designated an invasive species. “Yes, it would be nice to have lynx back,” Tunbridge told me, but “these guys can’t seem to accept that we have already got lynx out there.”

In 2012, after almost two decades of tracking without unearthing a smoking gun, Tunbridge thought he’d finally stumbled upon conclusive proof of the presence of big cats in the English countryside. In January that year, he found himself standing over the carcass of a roe deer in Woodchester Park, a country estate in Gloucestershire run by the National Trust. “There was still blood dripping from the chest cavity,” he said. In his mind there was no doubt that this was a big-cat kill.

David Bullock, then head of nature conservation at the National Trust, saw an opportunity to capture the public interest. He commissioned scientists from the University of Warwick to use dna analysis, which Tunbridge and his ilk had no access to. Robin Allaby, the lead scientist in the project, rushed to the scene and took dozens of swabs from the slain deer. He was open-minded about the cause of death and piqued by the idea of being the person who proved the existence of Britain’s big cats.

The press fixated on the kill. Bullock was excited by all the attention. But the trackers’ hopes were dashed. Allaby detected no dna from big cats: the evidence pointed to a fox. For believers, the results threatened to undermine their life’s work. But Tunbridge was convinced there had been a cover-up. He claimed he had received a call from someone sounding like Allaby who told him, “I can’t live with this much longer…leopard and puma dna were found.” The man said that the government and police had overridden the National Trust to suppress the evidence, in order not to frighten the public. (Allaby strongly denied this conversation ever took place. “Extraordinary!” he told me.)

Despite their differences, Tunbridge still retains the respect of those involved. “It’s his lifelong ambition, and it’s good to have somebody who’s so keen and dedicated,” Bullock said. People like him “stretch our imagination”. Allaby thinks that the idea of British big cats appeals because the British landscape is now pruned and biscuit-cut. “People have this image of this very tamed, almost Victorian or imperialistic idea of a dominated landscape, and I think it’s a cathartic notion that there might be something wild taking them out of their own domesticity.” Allaby keeps in touch with Minter and other trackers, and regularly receives packages of fox scat for dna analysis. (Postroom workers at Warwick University complained after someone sent them a rotting deer leg. They had to dispose of it as a bio-hazard.) “There’s this sort of general hunger for something that’s larger than us and our little lives,” Allaby told me.

The existence of big cats would prove the survival of an ineradicable strain of wildness in the face of developers and industrial farmers

Britain’s big-cat trackers insist that areas of the countryside remain impervious to man’s dominion. To them big cats are avatars of resistance to – even revenge for – humanity’s degradation of the natural world. Tunbridge’s theory contains a curious paradox. Species are dying, habitats are collapsing, the world is heating up – but, according to him, nature is getting on just fine out of sight. Does their advocacy call us back to the wild or palliate our guilt for the destruction we have wrought?

The Woodchester Park episode changed Tunbridge. Having endured media attention, he decided to give up his attempt to prove the existence of big cats to the world. “I thought, ‘It’s becoming a bit of a circus’,” he told me. He reckons that if conclusive evidence were ever published, trigger-happy officials would seek to eliminate this “invasive” species to maintain the bucolic familiarity of rural Britain.

Little Englanders would never accept a violent carnivore in their backyard. “You’d get loads of people wanting to shoot it, wanting to kill the animal, with a lot of destruction of the country and tramping over people’s lands,” Tunbridge said. (Minter also told me that he has promising tapes he will never publish for fear of a cull.)

Even if a trail camera were to capture incontrovertible footage of a big cat, Tunbridge now says he wouldn’t release it. He’s prepared to be labelled a crank for the rest of his life if it means protecting the animals he loves. “I just want to keep the mystery carrying on, really,” he said. He has made peace with the idea that the public won’t be persuaded on this issue. That means big cats can remain wholly his. ■

Jem Bartholomew is a freelance journalist in London.
Chris Dorley-Brown is a photographer in London

You can read the rest of 1843 magazine’s weekly coverage here

1843’s cut-outs of big cats were shot at strategically placed locations across Gloucestershire. To find out how we took the photos go to @1843mag on Instagram